Mental Illness, Hoaxes, and Scary Black Men
I’m not sure what provoked Ashley Todd to invent a hoax with enough red flags to set off loud warning bells with Michelle Malkin, a hoax which has now quickly unravelled. She’s said to have a history of attention getting lies.
Todd has a history of making up stories, said Dustan Costine, chairman of the Robertson County, Texas, Republican Party. He and Todd volunteered together on the failed presidential campaign of Rep. Ron Paul, R-Texas, a Green Tree native. Costine said Todd told supporters there that her car was vandalized because it had the candidate’s stickers on it. He provided an e-mail from Todd in which she said her car tires had been slashed.
Costine said Todd had talked of running for Texas governor in 2006 as a write-in candidate. She said she had been undergoing treatment for cancer, had lost her hair and often wore a wig. Still, he said, she constantly smoked.
But was Todd, who is now undergoing a psychological evaluation, acting out of some diagnosable mental illness? Is this the impulsiveness of high mania? The attention getting of borderline personality disorder? Did Todd actually think she could advance her cause with a Susan Smith-like tale of violence from an anonymous Big Scary Black Man? Or did she not really care all that much about the cause, as long as she had some interesting story to get her the attention she craved?
No real way to diagnose her from this distance (and it’s not as if I have the training to diagnose her even from close up). What I’m thinking of, though, now that I read the suggestions that she may, after all, be mentally ill, is John Strugnell, the brilliant Dead Seas scholar who was dismissed after making anti-Semitic remarks in an interview with an Israeli newspaper. He was, family and friends have said, mentally ill.
“It was not an excuse, it was reality,” said his daughter, Anne-Christine of San Rafael, Calif. “The reality was that he was diagnosed as manic depressive sometime in the early ’70s, and he was on medication for the rest of his life. I think it was amazing that he was often under treatment, and yet he managed. He remained at the top of his field and at the top of his game.”
And then I think of the people in Joel’s support groups who’ve told stories of things said and done in mania – those remarks about Mexicans, for example, or about an Indian immigrant. And, the moment of realization of what you’ve said – “that’s not me, that’s my mother,” or “no, I’m really not like that, I really don’t think that.” Depending on whether the person is on meds or has slipped off them, and how well the illness is being managed, that moment of realization may come quickly or not for a number of weeks. Either way, it strikes me, like a lot of the moodswings of bipolar disorder, as an exaggeration of what non-bipolar people do. Because, on the one hand, mania really isn’t like what the same person is when not manic, is much more out of control. I’ve heard Joel say things, when manic, that he never says or believes (has gone years without saying) once stable on his meds. But on the other hand – the business of saying something that sounds afterwards not like you, no, the real you isn’t as racist as that? That’s also something people do even when they’re not the least bit bipolar.
And, after all, even the acts of the mentally ill are shaped by culture. Whatever possesses a woman to mutilate herself for attention, and however her responsibility is or isn’t mitigated by some prior pathology, the fact that she knows “6′4″ big scary black man attacks little helpless white woman” to be just the way to get attention, and Twitters her way through a chipper account of heading to the bad side of Pittsburgh, where she’ll be attacked conveniently out of view of security cameras – obviously that part’s no accident. It neatly fits a well-worn narrative at any time (that’s why Susan Smith used the same trope), and works even more neatly in a battleground state in a racially charged election. But the same trope is out there for the picking, for people everywhere along the line from crazy to crazy like a fox. And even the most unbalanced people shape their stories out of such tropes (heck, even actual delusions draw on cultural tropes – CIA conspiracies in one country and vanishing genitals in another).
If Todd is indeed mentally ill, as seems likely now, I wish for her competent treatment.
UPDATE: hilzoy comments, and praises the Pittsburgh police.